One of the founders of the modern discipline of art history. Winckelmann was able to overcome immense difficulties
of poverty to
gain wide-spread success and influence as an influential art historian and
esthetician. Born the son of Martin Winckelmann, a poor shoemaker, and
Anna Maria Meyer (Winckelmann), the daughter of a weaver, Winckelmann attended a
gymnasium at Berlin and school at Salzwedel, Germany, before the university in
Halle, in 1738. There he heard the lectures on esthetics of Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762). Intending next on a career in medicine,
Winckelmann completed classes at Jena beginning in 1740, but was too poor to
continue. He spent 1743 to 1748 as a private tutor in Magdeburg and
then five unhappy years as an associate rector of a school at Seehausen in the
Altmark. Eventually he secured a position as the librarian for Heinrich,
Graf von Bünau (1697-1762), a wealthy
amateur scholar engaged in writing a history of the Roman emperors. This
position gave Winckelmann access not only to the count's superb library but also
access to the artistic center of Dresden where the Saxon electors had amassed an
extensive collection of art. Winckelmann met the artist Adam Friedrich
Oeser (1717-1799) whose artistic temperament would later influence Goethe. He
left the count's service in 1754 and moved to Dresden where he secured the
patronage from the Saxon court to finance a study trip to Rome in 1755.
There he published his famous Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen
Werke in der Mahlerey und Bilderkunst (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek
Works), 1755. The work made Winckelmann famous. It was reprinted several
times and translated into French and English, the latter translated by the
Swiss/British painter Henry Fuseli. Winckelmann's stipend only allowed him two
years stay in Italy, but the outbreak of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763)
altered his plans. To supplement his small pension in Rome, Winckelmann
landed a series of Papal appointments, first as librarian to Alberico Cardinal
Archinto (1698-1758), the papal secretary of state. When Archinto died, he
became librarian to Cardinal Albani, one of the great connoisseurs of the
eighteenth century. By now Winckelmann's homosexuality, which had
never been much repressed, was out in the open. His affairs included that
of the artist Franz Stauder, a pupil of Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) whom he
roomed with briefly, and a young Florentine named Nicoló Castellani. By 1763,
Winckelmann was the prefect of antiquities (Prefetto delle Antichità) of the
Vatican, a position once held by Raphael himself and associated with the Vatican
library. Winckelmann devoted himself to studying the texts, visiting the
ancient monuments of Rome and its private collections, and guiding visitors
around the environs. In this capacity he met many of the aristocratic and
artistic personages of Europe. These included Mengs, whose paintings
became the medium through which Winkelmann's ideas were realized, and Angelika
Kaufmann, who painted his portrait. At 45 Winckelmann fell in love with a
young nobleman, Friedrich von Berg, and dedicated to him Abhandlung von der
Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen (1763). In 1768 Winckelmann
traveled to Vienna, where he was received by the Empress Maria Theresa. On his way back to
Rome, he was murdered in a hotel by a man named Francesco Arcangeli where
Winckelmann was showing coins presented by Maria Theresa. He is buried in
the cemetery of the cathedral of St Giusto at Trieste.

Winckelmann's Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der Greischiechen Werke of 1755
had a major influence on esthetics and art histories. In addition to being
one of the impetuses for Neoclassicism, his writings anchored Greek art in a
prototypical schema which future histories of art would mimic. His
important art-historical essays on the Belvedere Toro and Apollo Belvedere
(1759), and the frescoes at Herculaneum (1762 and 1764—some of the
earliest discussions of the topic) are serious art essays. His
Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art, 1764), the
effort of seven years' research, founds the periodization of a linear conception of art
history. It contrasted the thematic, i.e., non-historical treatment of classical art popular in the
eighteenth century, for example, in the work of Bernard de Montfaucon(L'Antiquité
expliquée).

Winckelmann's style was that of an outspoken taste-maker. He detested the
Baroque, and even found the classicists of the seventeenth-century insipid.
His allegiance to Raphael and to the art of his contemporary and friend Mengs
remained supreme. He considered Meng's Parnassus superior to Reni's Aurora. Domenichino's art, which Winckelmann considered was closer
to the ancients more than any other follower of the Carracci, never
achieved the purity of Raphael in drawing the nude. Many of Winckelmann
assertions, for example, that Greek art was the stimulus for the High
Renaissance, were the result of his own feelings for the art rather than hard
scholarship. Winckelmann's situating Greek art as the cornerstone to Western
artistic creation inspired artists and historians alike to view modern art as a
compiling of a tradition. Such a conclusion is all the more admirable when
one considers that many of his assessments of Greek art were based upon inferior
copies or medals. The esthetician Gotthold Ephraim Lessing based much of his
ideas of his Laokoon (1766) on Winckelmann's writing on Greek art.